Weapon Befits Not Those Who Are Cunning But Those Who Are Brave – Garegin Nzhdeh

Homeland gives to a person a feeling of fair pride, the deepest suffering, the most complete of confessions, and the holiest of deaths. One appealing cry which has come from the depths of the pagan centuries still resonates in my blood:

“Soldiers of Armenia, if we do not drown the enemy in these waves, we will have no more Motherland” (Parilli).

This means that those who are retreating before a mortal danger assume that death has power over life. This means that the one who runs away when his Motherland fights betrays all that is sacred in this world. He refuses the ideal inherent in him, which is the Motherland, and is destroyed morally.

“An Armenian commander,” said Parilli, “did not want to live after defeat. He rode in the direction of the enemy and died heroically. With the last blow of his sword, he cut the helmet and the head of the enemy commander.

His warriors, enraged, attacked the enemy to defend the body of their commander. The battle was desperately hopeless, and every single soldier died.”

This is how Armenians loved their homeland even before the adoption of Christianity.

In those days, said Parilli, the Armenian saying went that an elderly soldier could not lie or say something reckless. What a high sense of morality! How similar is the Armenian warrior to his “wise and brave gods.”

It has been correctly said thousands of times that the “weapon befits not those who are cunning but those who are brave.”

And although today’s weapons are predominantly mathematical, the fates of armies today are and tomorrow and forever will be determined by the human spirit.

The nation that along with the improvement of military equipment is not improving its warrior will not achieve anything substantial.

From random and “stolen victories,” no country got anything.

It’s good, of course, to have one more weapon, but even a thousandfold superiority is completely pointless when there is no heroic spirit in the warriors who reconcile with the idea of death.

The irresistible desire to command and obey, the urge to go to meet difficulties, the thirst for death in battle is in today’s language called legionism, or muridism, as a Caucasian highlander would say. In Armenian, it is called taronakutyun. This is what makes the weapon precise and victorious in the hands of a warrior.

What brought us, the Armenians, victories at Sardarapat and Karakilisa? The non-existent superiority in numbers and weapons, maybe a brilliant battle plan? Nothing but our oath, our will to die and not to see a Turk in Yerevan and Etchmiadzin.

Yes, the engine of the military art tomorrow and forever will be the man and his spirit.

And despite this, thanks to materialism and a special feeling of envy inherent in democracy, oil was proclaimed the main hero of the war instead of the spirit.

Garegin Nzhdeh